Top 24 Communities for the Community Manager

Community management in the past 1-2 years has exploded as an industry full of “experts.”

It’s hard to tell what’s a legitimate resource, who’s actually handling community in an organization, and who is merely managing social media platforms. Even harder is finding out where seasoned community managers live on a day to day basis since the majority of the best ones are people so entrenched in their own communities, they’re hard to find.

We created this list of top CMs out there a few weeks ago, so that’s a good place to find specific individuals, and hopefully you know that there’s the weekly #CmgrChat every Wednesday at 2pm EST. However, there are plenty of places to discuss community with those who are doing it on a day to day basis.

Here are 24 communities you can get involved in on a variety of platforms:

Enjoy this article?

Jenn Pedde

Jenn is a Co-Founder of The Community Manager and the Editor-In-Chief. She’s also an adjunct professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. You can find her almost anywhere online, but specifically on #CmgrChat every Wednesday from 2-3pm ET.

Really useful list, and thanks to the other commenters for chipping in their additional resources. Looking forward to meeting more CM’s across these various communities and figuring out that age old questions: who community manages community managers?

Hi Jenn. For those of us Down Under can you please add the Australian Community Managers' Facebook Group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/australiancommunitymanagers/). We hold semi-regular roundtables for CMs in different cities in Australia. There is also the annual swarm conference which is for Aus Community Managers and is being held in Melbourne in September. Many thanks for your article! Alison

I am sort of surprised not to see the Community Managers Group (http://www.communitymanagersgroup.com/) which has been serving those in the community field within the game industry for quite a few years (since 2006). Granted I may be biased since I originally started the group (but handed management over to others) but spans over 100 companies and over 600 members. It may be only for those in the games industry (to include press) but it is a well established group.

@DavidSpinks No problem. And, like I said, it's geared specifically for the game industry so I can see why its probably an unknown outside of it (to the general public). But I know I've talked to a lot of individuals outside of games about Social Media and Community Management these last few years who have been interested in learning more about the guidelines, mechanics, and headaches in dealing in such a large industry (last year the video game market was valued at $65 billion). Especially now that I work outside of it (but still in community management), people are looking to find parallels and lessons learned from those who have been doing this for over a decade.